Iron Hearts
by TheLostRelic
Summary: They both built, but for different purposes that were inextricably intertwined, for they had both loved and lost spectacularly. Hear the unsung story of Hephaestus, abandoned by his mother and betrayed by his wife, as he desperately seeks pure love in a world that seems to adamantly deny him of it. Follow Leo as he pines for the girl so tantalizingly close yet unreachably far away.


**Iron Hearts**

The clang of metal on metal rang out in a clarion call throughout the fire lit forge. The furnace besides him roared with an intensity that would have fried anyone else to a crisp, but he merely wiped his brow, rolled back his sleeves, and slammed the hammer back down again. His mind was so blissfully blank as he pounded relentlessly, crafting and coaxing the cold unyielding metal into becoming something far more soft and pliant. Now he could bend it to his will, make it into anything that he wanted it to be and that made him heady with power.

Hephaestus wiped the back of his hands against the black apron he wore before turning to retrieve his tongs. He turned them over once or twice in his large, calloused, yet dexterous fingers before turning back once again to his project. With loving care, he gently squeezed the tongs to lift the celestial bronze and then he proceeded to drop it in a bucket filled with icy cold water. With a violent hiss, the steam spiraled outwards in tendrils, fogging the goggles perched atop his head. Then he placed it back on the table and resumed his careful pounding of the celestial bronze, allowing his mind to go blank once again.

~0~

Leo squinted up at Festus's head as he balefully took a bite out of his sandwich. As always, he felt pangs of guilt and regret shoot through his heart like arrows, spreading like a cancer. He should have been able to fix him! He was a Son of Hephaestus for Zeus's sake! That was practically on his birth certificate; right next to falling head over heels for every pretty girl he saw, being an awkward third wheel, and being the greatest mistake to ever walk on two feet.

The sandwich tasted like sand in his mouth, but when he remembered that it was Piper who had made it for him, it seemed to regain some iota of flavor.

_Piper. _

Sometimes he thought that it was unfair for anyone or anything to be so beautiful or perfect, but he knew in his heart of hearts that if anyone deserved it, it was Piper. He knew that it was beyond wrong (and most definitely violated article _freaking_ one of the BroCode) to have a crush on his best friend's girlfriend, but he couldn't help it. Piper was the first real friend that he had ever made, and he was also hers. She was unfairly gorgeous, ridiculously kind and understanding, and could actually tolerate or feel concerned for him.

That was what got Leo the most: How a beautiful girl like Piper ever bothered to give him the time of day, let alone felt _concerned_ about him, was beyond him. Yet there she was, his best and first friend, so tantalizingly close yet so unattainably far away.

Not for the first time, he wondered if she thought along similar veins about him. What if there was time when Piper McLean, the most gorgeous girl to ever walk this planet, actually felt something for Leo, lowly mechanic and side kick extraordinaire? Maybe if Jason had never come along, they might have even become something more than friends.

_As if... _Leo snorted to himself, his sandwich hovering before his mouth.

~0~

Outcast of Olympus, thrown from the city of the gods by the very woman who gave birth to him, scorned by Love herself due to his revolting appearance.

Those labels clung to Hephaestus like a curse, following him everywhere and always weighing on his mind. It was no secret that he had gotten the short end of the stick as a god - all of the other gods were flawless in appearance and amicable to some extent. However, he was pockmarked and disfigured, disabled and broken, lonely and miserable.

Sometimes he would tell himself that it was alright and that he didn't need the other gods anyways, but he knew that he was lying. As despicable and dysfunctional as they were, they were family and _they couldn't stand the sight of him_, and try as he might, he couldn't ignore the fact that it hurt him deeply.

Family was supposed to stick together, be there for each other, not abandon one of their own based on appearance. The Olympians, in all their vanity and hubris, were no better than mortals - judging the content of an individuals character without even having the decency to get to know them. Maybe if they had accepted him when he was born, he might have actually liked interacting with other people. Maybe he wouldn't have to barricade himself in his workshop and he could actually see the world.

Despite the occasional fling or promising mortal or demigod, Hephaestus rarely ventured from the fires of his forge. On somedays, the walls closed in around him and constricted suffocating him. Imprisoned in his own home.

He built and built and built, but he could never could rebuild what was broken inside him. It was highly probable that it couldn't be fixed, but he struggled anyways, sinking in the mire of desperation as he hopelessly pursued that which evaded him time and time again: Love.

His own mother, Hera, had thrown him off of Mount Olympus when she saw him. Claiming that he was ugly and therefore, no son of hers, she threw her own child off the mountain and left him to fend for himself in the cold world. God or not, not having a mother that loved or accepted you was something that was impossibly painful.

Then there was the whole debacle with Aphrodite. Zeus had married her off to him because she was so beautiful, the other gods began to fight amongst each other for her hand. Forcing Aphrodite to marry him was the ultimate insult. It signified that he was so ugly and repulsive that it was only fair for the ravishing Goddess of Love to be stuck with him.

Hephaestus forced a nauseating sense of disgust back down his system at the thought.

He was always gentle and kind to her - he made her things from his workshop that he poured his heart and soul into, and she tossed them away, dismissing them as trinkets and nothing more. Despite the hurt he felt, he genuinely cared for her and loved her.

Aphrodite however took every opportunity she could to escape him, and it wasn't long before he stopped resisting. She slept with man after man after man, trying desperately to quench her insatiable appetite. She was searching for something that no one could seem to provide her with: genuine love. Had she opened her eyes even marginally, she would have seen that her husband had already provided her with that which she so hungrily sought and that she had returned his love unrequited.

Soon, Ares was her next target and while horribly unsuccessful in this endeavor as well, she was at least away from the lowly and revolting Hephaestus, which was good enough for her. She outwardly cheated on him with another Olympian, his brother no less, and didn't seem to pause to consider the effect that this had on him.

Every crime, every punishment, every wrong inflicted on him fell like hammer blows to his heart. Only his heart became cold and iron instead of soft and pliant.

~0~

With a huff and swiping of his curly and greasy black hair, Leo studied the automaton before him. It was nearly complete, but he couldn't get the darned thing to work and it frustrated him to no end. Usually, he would only need to twist the key on the back and the machination would spark to life, but when he turned it this time, the contraption remained stoically and stubbornly inanimate.

Cursing loudly under his breath, he threw his wrench into the empty space of Bunker 9, his only real home. Even Camp Half-Blood was not home to him. Despite his personality and his wit, he felt like an alien and he thought the campers treated him as such.

Behind all the smiles and jokes, Leo was a broken boy with a broken heart, and try as he might, he could never quite manage to fix it. It began with the death of his mother, an incident for which he still blamed himself because he knew that it was true. It was because of his fire powers that the workshop she worked at caught on fire and it was his powers that left him alive and alone.

He threw himself at every girl that walked on two legs because he hoped dearly that at least one of them would stick around, but no such luck. Leo was a pestilence to the female gender and he knew that all too well. Only Piper could seem to tolerate him, but now even she was off with Jason, doing gods knows what, far more frequently than she used to.

With a sigh, he slumped up against a workbench and rubbed his forehead which was starting to hurt. Unbeckoned, thoughts began to pour into his brain and he sat there and pondered in the still of the silence.

The ironic thing was that _Leo_ had been there for Piper first, he had befriended her, he had gotten her to trust him with her secrets, but then Jason showed up and everything changed. Piper fell head over heels for the guy and soon, Leo became the awkward third wheel with no where to go and no one to turn to.

He loved his friends to death, but he couldn't help but feel neglected. Soon it became "Jason and Piper", not "Jason, Piper, and Leo", just "Jason and Piper". It was almost as though he wasn't worthy of being mentioned and that hurt - it hurt so much. Try as he might to ignore it, he couldn't ignore the fact that they were drifting apart from one another.

_Just more people to walk out of my life._ He thought bitterly, before turning back to his work.

~0~

Hephaestus learned eons ago that there was no point in love - it was just a fallacy or at the very most, not for him. It was far better to shun the world of the living in favor of a world of machines and pure creativity. Here, he was not judged by critical and condescending eyes that held nothing but contempt and disgust for him. Here was home, among the companionable blaze of the furnace and cool smooth steel of his workbenches.

With the ability to make anything his heart desired, he built wondrous inventions that captivated all that saw his work, but he did not work for admiration; he worked for the sheer pleasure of artistic expression. It almost masked his underlying misery. Almost.

Despite all the pleasure he derived from creating things, his machines could never love him. They would never have the warmth that a living being would have, they would never have the idiosyncrasies and quirks, they would never have unique personalities and petty desires. They would just never be enough for him, and building an endless number of automatons wasn't ever going to change that.

Grunting as the final hammer stroke fell, Hephaestus stepped back to examine his work. After submerging it within the lapping water one final time, he grasped it with his bare hands and scrutinized it, holding it up against the fiery backdrop of his forge.

The celestial bronze heart was flawless - it glistened and sparkled at every angle that you looked at it. However, despite it's extraordinary craftsmanship, it was quite clearly lacking something: a heartbeat. That was the final ingredient to make it absolutely and unquestionably perfect, but there was no force on this planet that could emulate the beat of a heart down to every minute detail.

The best Hephaestus would be able to do would be to invent some sort of mechanical pump to make it throb, but it would never be real. It would never rise in urgency when excited or happy or lovestruck. It would never ache with saudade or burst with anger or jealousy. It was just a cold lump of metal - that's all it came down to.

_Makes you and me both... _Hephaestus thought bitterly, staring forlornly at his creation.

For a second, his hand twitched as he considered discarding it, but ultimately he decided against it. His real heart was defective and the manufacturer couldn't seem to fix it. In the end, it was never a bad idea to have a new heart replace the one he had broken beyond repair, even if it was cold and lifeless.

~0~

"Eureka!" Leo exclaimed proudly, as he held the automaton up in the palm of his hand.

He admired his work as a grin, so large it stretched endlessly, split across his face. Everything about it was absolutely spot on - all the measurements, the components, the durability, the form, and the function.

The problem was with the wiring apparently. After noodling around a little bit more, he had discovered that the tiny automaton didn't seem to be wired properly. They were all jumbled about on the inside, but on the outside it had looked absolutely fine. No one would have really known without investigating the insides rigorously and attentively.

_Just like me... _Leo had thought at the time, feeling slightly melancholy.

After a few more second of gushing with pride and mentally applauding himself, he raced out of the Bunker, only to be greeted with a rush of clear morning air. Dawn was breaking over the horizon, basking the valley in its warm, golden glow and streaks of pale blue, purple, and orange streaked across the sky as if painted by a divine artist.

Grinning inanely to himself, Leo uncovered his hand and inspected the perfect little automaton dove resting in his palm. At first glance, a viewer would have thought that it was a real bird were it not for the pale bronze color instead of a traditional white. With trembling hands, he began to twist the key on the back of the robot while thinking about Piper.

He loved her; he knew that much for sure. He also knew that there was no way that she would ever love him back, at least not in the way that Leo felt about her. She was with Jason, the Golden Boy, and Leo was just the lowly mechanic that couldn't seem to fix or do anything right. On top of that, Piper was just way out of his league and he knew that no matter how he struggled, there was no way out of that.

Thinking back, there was a time when Piper too rested in the palm of Leo's hand - a time before Jason and giants and gods; a time when they were inseparable friends that shared everything with each other. He should have made his move then - he should have asked her out or kissed her or something! Anything was better than what he actually did: shrinking back in fear like the coward he was, too terrified of rejection to tell the girl he loved about how he really felt. And now he would forever hold his peace.

The dove finally sparked to life and it's eyes illuminated, a light flickering on behind them. Leo grinned to himself as it flitted up off his hand and into the air tentatively and then more steadily. It focused it's kaleidoscope eyes (he had used the glass from an actual kaleidoscope) on him and tilted its head, almost questioningly, as though it knew that something was wrong.

Then it turned away suddenly and left before Leo could give any explanation, and he stood there dumbly, cursing how much this paralleled his life. As Leo watched the bronze dove flit away into the sunrise, he abruptly began to chase after it. Blood pounded in his ears as his feet slapped against the grassy knolls rhythmically, never allowing the tiny robot bird to leave his line of sight.

Leo was used to running. In fact, he was good at it; _too_ good at it. After running away from countless schools and orphanages where his mess of a life only got worse, he was accustomed to running. It was his personal defense mechanism in order to escape the hell that was his existence.

However, when he ran now, it was not away from something, but towards something or rather _someone_. Watching that dove fly away, he knew that even though he had let her slip through his fingers once, he sure as hell wasn't going to let it happen again. And so he chased, possibly for something that he would never quite be able to catch, but it didn't matter to him.

That wasn't the point.

He would run and run for all of eternity if he had to, until his feet bleed and tore off from overuse, he would run, chasing the special, beautiful, and unreachable dove that had taken something very important of his, something he had to retrieve at all costs.

His heart.

* * *

**A/N: Hello everyone! This is my first ever one-shot! Anyhow, I'm super super excited and happy with it. It was an entirely different experience altogether, but one that I enjoyed immensely. Personally, I've always thought that Leo and Hephaestus were more interconnected than any of the other Gods were with their children because their lives so closely parallel each others. No one has ever really thought about how bad Hephaestus has had it, and I felt it warranted a story. Leo's just fit so well with it that I couldn't resist adding it in. It's not the longest thing ever, but I am proud of it. If you enjoyed it: Follow, Favorite, and Review!**

**Side Note: If you haven't figured it out, the dove symbolizes Piper. Derp. Also, I am having major writer's block with Second Chance. It'll be a while before I update because I don't want to rush things and screw it up. Thanks for understanding and I apologize for the length of this author note. **


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